Why Are We the Last Person to Seduce Ourselves: On the Erotic Knowledge of fog/mess/clutter/truth

"Longing / Etiquette," 2024 Mixed Media (Digital)

It’s got to get foggy sometimes for you to want to see.

Something I don’t see addressed nearly enough is the inevitable fatigue that ensues as a consequence of overly-controlling the self-creation process.

Simply put it’s reductive and you know it, when it’s merely a means of practice.

The other side obviously hints at creative receptivity, not being so sure in one’s designations.

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It pushes up against the notion of clarity as the means of manifestation as opposed to clarity as a dynamic and recursive part of the process, ergo fog/mess/clutter is vitally necessary.

Not something to be bred out or pared away.

Not something. To be bred out. Or pared. Away.

When I am working on a new piece, I start with ‘clear’ and obvious images, complete images, halted images, designated images— and then things become clear and unclear repeatedly until I untether myself from the work out of disinterest or a subtle and mysterious sense of satisfaction.

When things aren’t clear, the last thing to do is (try to) look directly at it.

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from “The World is Large and Full of Noises: Thoughts on Translation” by Jane Hirshfield

Knowledge is erotic. We see this not only in the Bible’s dual use of the term “to know,” but also, as classicist Anne Carson has pointed out, in the Homeric verb mnaomai, which means both “to hold in attention” and “to woo.” What we regard must seduce us, and we it, if we are to continue looking.

Why are we

the last person

to seduce ourselves?

The fundamental illusion (of materialism) dictates! that the closer you are, the more you can see and therefore the more you can know.

Like reducing all to atoms, like being alive long enough to think you’ve got it all figured out.

Oh, desire!

What false sympathies— and antipathies— are made in the name of desire for the sake of ‘maturity’?

We would be closer by gathering, like proper collectors, the things that interest us, that capture our attention each and every day if even for a moment— and responding with a knowing which says “This is a part of me” instead of “I like this”— after all, we are almost there, only missing one word, the word that our very evolution hinges on:

AM.

So that instead it becomes “I (am) like this.”

How much would this fundamentally change us simply by fact of doing so, furthermore how much would we change if a fundamental trust was built from its repetition that this is closer to the way of self-discovery?

What logically follows is, of course, how do we begin to make sense of our collections, to understand them?

In the perpetual embrace of spirit and matter, objectivity and subjectivity, universal and individual. In other words, through life itself.

To understand anything, you have to orient yourself firstly to its spiritual origin.

Or else, you look at everything with one eye.

It’s likely this will be the subject of the next program I offer as my complete devotion to ‘making sense of our collections’ is truly behind my every move.

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Art and science in their true forms come together to corroborate one another.

In subjective and objective knowledge they are two halves of the same whole.

If we study the longest lineage of knowledge on this planet, specifically its most timely expression: spiritual science or Anthroposophy, then we can begin to understand the spiritual world objectively.

Only then are we are apt to become more and more fully enabled to interface with truth on a subjective level.

This includes the truth of our collections.

Developing the super-sensible faculties necessary to directly and objectively experience the spiritual world are the same faculties required to truly understand the self.

In our creations, we arrive at the same objective conclusions personally, through the lens of our individuated human perspective (AM).

These are our subjective contributions to the objective whole.

Our contributions are purified (and thus remain) to the degree that we devote ourselves with and in our very lives to both objective understanding (science) and subjective understanding (art).

There is no objective understanding without spiritual understanding.

There is no subjective understanding without spiritual understanding.

You cannot truly understand anything: life, the world, yourself— if you omit the spiritual from which all things originate.

If it is not spiritually motivated, it is not art.

"The Art of today will be the Nature of tomorrow and will blossom again in her. Thus does Involution become Evolution.”

Rudolf Steiner

Ah, the reservations we have against doing what we love because of the social pressures we have agreed to inherit!

It must be for oneself first (AM) for it to be true.

Those who give for others first, as in not originating from a genuine self-contained desire to be giving, are ashamed and thus afraid of their own capacity for selfishness and greed.

By giving for others, they are ‘beating back’ against the self, going against the self in an underhanded attempt to ‘correct’ these desires which they have disowned, instead of giving to the self to the degree that is truly their desire.

Only then can a direct confrontation with the reality of their selfishness and the potential for transmutation of these desires via their own inner initiative become possible.

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And we all know perfectly well that one thing leads to another.

I am not constantly advocating above all for deeper self-involvement as solely the means by which we get to be who we want to be and live how we want to live, I am advocating for deeper self-involvement because it is the only means by which you can know truth—who you want to be, the life you want to live require truth to be real and to last— there is simply no way around it (You).

Thank God.